Equilibrium Participation in Public Goods Allocations

Abstract

An alternative notion of individual rationality for mechanism design is studied in which mechanisms suggest public goods allocations and individuals then choose whether or not to submit their requested transfer to the central planner. The set of allocations such that unanimous participation is a Nash equilibrium is shown to be sub-optimal in a wide variety of environments and shrinks to the endowment as the economy is replicated. Therefore, any non-trivial mechanism suffers from non-participation in the selected outcome when agents cannot be coerced to contribute.